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Territorializing MaoismDictatorship, War, and Anticolonialism in the Portuguese“Long Sixties”
In the 1960s and 1970s, the influence of Maoism extended all over theworld, although its ideological impact has mainly been associatedwith certain specific national contexts. The aim of this article is to
analyze the projection of Maoism in Portugal in the final years of theEstado Novo dictatorship, focusing on the intervention and discourse ofthe Movimento Reorganizativo do Partido do Proletariado (MRPP;Movement for the Reorganization of the Party of the Proletariat). TheMRPP was not the only organization that claimed an explicit link withMaoism, but it was the one that most clearly combined an imaginary linkto the Chinese Cultural Revolution with a particular mix of youthactivism, triumphalism and moralism. This article explores the hypothesisthat the particular constraints forged by the dictatorship and thesignificant impact of the colonial war produced a specific territorializationand influence of Maoism in Portugal during the first half the 1970s.
The Portuguese Dictatorship and the Colonial War
It is important to note that during the twentieth century, Portugal livedunder a long dictatorship imposed at the beginning of the 1930s within thecontext of the rise of philo-fascisms in Europe and defined by anantiliberal and corporative ideology. The state was governed by António
O Bolchevista (The Bolshevist), and the MRPP were also founded in 1970.
This second Maoist wave created a new militant galaxy. The majority of its
members had not passed through the ranks of the PCP and had already
been influenced to a certain extent by the radical student culture.
As a whole, the “Marxist-Leninist” or Maoist organizations represented
the most significant current within the Portuguese far left in the final
years of the dictatorship, both in terms of their dimensions and their
visibility and impact.10 There are various reasons for this, which may be
grouped into four main explanations. First, Maoism had the added
attraction of referring to the imaginary of a frugal, egalitarian China and
the political processes unfolding in what was at the time called the “Third
World.” Second, given its anti-imperialist stance, Maoism was particularly
able to prioritize the anticolonial struggle. This issue resounded with
singular emphasis on the lives of young Portuguese people who, if they
had not fled the country, knew that sooner or later they would be called
up for military service and sent to Africa. Third, it already had a coherent
theoretical corpus, produced between 1964 and 1965, molded by texts
written by Francisco Martins Rodrigues and the pages of Revolução
Popular (Popular Revolution), the organ of the CMLP. Despite the
differences between the first and second waves of Maoism, these
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documents allowed for an ideological demarcation to be established in
relation to the PCP and offered a perspective on revolutionary action in
the country.
Finally, Maoism formed part of a Leninist organizational culture that
emphasized democratic centralism and secrecy, which made it more able
to withstand the onslaughts of the Estado Novo— unlike organized
anarchism, for example, which had practically disappeared in the country
by the early 1940s. However, in relation to the more traditional
communist or socialist-republican currents, the Maoist camp defended
more open forms of opposition to the dictatorship, which meant that it
was more enthusiastically received by youth sectors influenced by the
antidisciplinary Weltanschauung.11 It offered them a new confrontational
form of practice that traditional communism had not provided and an
ideological grammar that combined the almost total politicization of all
aspects of life with a very concrete focus on the war and ways of rejecting
it. Among the Portuguese Maoist galaxy, the MRPP was the organization
that most explicitly evoked the imaginary linked to the Chinese Cultural
Revolution, combined youth activism with triumphalist messages, and
engaged in a radicalized activism based on aggressive opposition to the
colonial war. The next section observes how these elements materialized
in the political language and work of the group.
The MRPP: Creating through Struggle the Party ThatHad Never Existed
The organization was founded at a clandestine meeting held in Lisbon on
19 September 1970, attended by Arnaldo Matos, Fernando Rosas, João
Machado and Vidaúl Ferreira, which from then onward constituted the
Lenin Committee, the Central Committee of the organization. The origins
of the MRPP in fact date back to developments in certain youth sectors
following the October 1969 elections for the National Assembly,12 and the
involvement of the Esquerda Democrática Estudantil (EDE; Student
Democratic Left) in the student unrest that took place in Lisbon in 1968 –
69. The roots of the EDE itself lay in the demonstration against the
Vietnam War at the American Embassy on 21 February 1968, an event that
aimed to have a rebound effect on the war being fought in Africa. The
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social base of the MRPP therefore consisted of radicalized young people in
the capital or its outskirts, in a context in which Marcelismo had proved to
be a failed project for greater openness, and the war, which had been
waged for almost a decade, was heading toward a particularly critical
phase.
The Law Faculty at the University of Lisbon became the most visible
focus for the movement’s work and recruitment, with its influence
subsequently extending to other schools in Lisbon and later, from 1973
onward, to student circles in Coimbra, Porto, Braga, and Guimarães.
While it is true that the student contingent was an important component
within the movement, this also meant that for a long time the presence of
the MRPP or structures that it developed in other areas of society, namely
within the fringes of young workers in the Lisbon area and the region
north of the capital, were disregarded. The organization was also active in
some cultural cooperatives— until 1971–72, when they became the target
of legal intervention that sought to restrict their activities—and
publications such as O Tempo e o Modo (The Time and the Manner), an
important magazine founded in 1963 by Catholic critics of Salazarism,
which underwent a radical makeover at the end of the 1960s that would
later establish the hegemony of the MRPP in the publication.
In December 1970, the Bandeira Vermelha (Red Flag) was launched as
the theoretical organ of the MRPP. It proposed a regrouping of the
Marxist-Leninists, because the PCP was seen as dominated “by a fraction
of the bourgeoisie that betrays and paralyses the struggle of the working
class and the exploited.”13 The expression “reorganization” also indicated
its commitment to the Marxist-Leninist line dedicated to “reconstructing”
the true Communist Party. While the document— essentially written by
Fernando Rosas, a former PCP militant—valued certain moments in the
history of the PCP up to 1956, it also affirmed that since its foundation in
1921, the PCP had been a “failed attempt at a Marxist-Leninist rupture
with the petty bourgeois domination of the working class movement,”
and that its history amounted to nothing more than a “long itinerary of
petty bourgeois control.”14 This latter position, defended in particular by
Arnaldo Matos, would become a key issue for the organization in relation
to other Maoist groups.
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Although it was not the only one, the MRPP was the group most clearly
identified by the use of the expression “Maoism” as its label. Despite
displaying a Red Guard on its header, in February 1971 the organization’s
clandestine newspaper Luta Popular (The People’s Struggle) only refers to
itself as “the universal truth of Marxism-Leninism.”15 However, from
mid-1971 onward, slogans shaped by the Cultural Revolution began to
emerge in the group’s publications, and Maoism was defended as the
“Marxism-Leninism of our time.”16 The actual titles of the newspapers of
the affiliated organizations, such as the Guarda Vermelha (Red Guard—
produced by the Federation of Marxist-Leninist Students, an MRPP
student organization), reflected this direct evocation of Maoist China.
From December 1973 onward, the newspaper of the cultural organization
linked to the MRPP was called Yenan, after the Chinese city where the
Long March had ended and the center of the communist insurrection
from 1935 to 1948. The presence of China—and the Asian struggle in
general—was also evident in the type of visual documentation that was
disseminated, which featured figures in the typical uniform of the Red
Guards, with eyes that were more almond-shaped than those of
westerners.
On 12 October 1972, José António Ribeiro dos Santos, a law student and
prominent activist in the Federation of Marxist-Leninist Students
(Federação de Estudantes Marxistas-Leninistas), was assassinated by agents
of the DGS.17 The funeral of Ribeiro dos Santos was transformed into a
significant demonstration against the regime and ended with the intervention
of the police and the imprisonment of various demonstrators.18 The MRPP
Central Committee approved the resolution Todos os Quadros São
Servidores do Povo (All Cadres Are Servants of the People), which contained
a eulogy to the “first Marxist-Leninist-Maoist who gave his life for the
Proletarian Revolution and for Communism,” using the language of
martyrdom. The episode reinforced the hostility of the MRPP toward the
PCP and the other political formations on the far left, which it called
“neo-revisionists.” The resolution stated that they benefited from the
“favors of repression, since they not only boycotted the construction of
the revolutionary party of the proletariat, but also denounced its
militants.”19
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In a study on memories of activism in the MRPP, Paula Godinho
clearly shows how the tragic death of Ribeiro dos Santos defined a “before
and after” period in the lives of a good many ex-militants from the group.
The effects of this “primordial death” created a “flesh and blood memory”
that could not be forgotten and a caesura in the passage of collective and
individual time.20 In a lengthy interview that took place nearly 40 years
after the event, Aurora Rodrigues talked about the significance of this
death “which I never got over,” adding that “the people who were with me
could not either.” She also recalled how the memory of Ribeiro dos Santos
helped her to resist interrogation at the headquarters of the political police
and the torture she was subjected to, which included beatings and several
days of sleep deprivation.21
Another distinctive characteristic of the MRPP was its accentuated
moralism, clearly expressed in the directive Pensar, Agir e Viver como
Revolucionários (Think, Act and Live Like Revolutionaries), dating from
October 1972. In this document, following a case of adultery in the ranks,
the Central Committee decided to launch a campaign understood as a
“prophylactic” against the “microbes of bourgeois moral corruption.” The
main weapon against liberal ideologies had to be understood as “a vast
and energetic campaign of criticism and self-criticism” of the moral and
amorous behavior of militants to “eradicate from our ranks any displays
of ideological, moral and political corruption.”22
According to Guerreiro Jorge, one of the reasons why there was no
criticism of the traditional model for marriage and relationships was due
to the practical need to make houses available, in a context in which a
clandestine existence was one of the key mechanisms for political action.
As he states, on the basis of his own experience, “the MRPP had no
structure or money for many houses. In 1972–73 many were in prison and
more people needed to go into hiding...I married and the party
immediately started to use my house.”23 However, in addition to this
eminently practical reason, value was clearly placed on a “proletarian
morality” aimed at enabling militants to absorb the typical forms of
behavior of the people.
In fact, the condemnation of adultery, defense of marriage, and use of
appropriate sober clothing were the visible faces of the diffusion of a
model of militancy based on purity, abnegation, and the idea of acting in
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line with what was understood to be the moral sentiments of the masses.24
Morally reprehensible behavior was seen as the result of damaging
imperialist influences. In January 1974, an MRPP cultural organization
defined Portugal as a “neocolony” in which the “jackals of imperialism”
were subjecting “the Portuguese people to their decadent values, corrupt
habits, pornography, prostitution, poisonous and alienating propaganda,
oppression and humiliation, imperiously trampling our beloved people
underfoot.”25
The importance of the commitment to anticolonialism was a key
characteristic of the MRPP. It should be noted that in Portugal, criticism
of the colonial war only entered the list of student demands relatively late.
By the end of the 1960s, explicit opposition to the conflict in Africa was
still the preserve of small groups on the far left or students who had links
with the colonies, such as those who lived in the Casa de Estudantes do
Império (Home of the Students of the Empire) and some of the Coimbra
student houses (Repúblicas). Explicit revolt against the war only developed
in student circles from 1968 – 69 onward. On 21 February 1970, the first
demonstration was held as a direct protest against the colonial war,
organized by the Comités de Luta Anticolonial (Anticolonial Struggle
Committees) led by young pro-Maoists. In February 1971, the headline of
the first issue of Luta Popular, the organ of the MRPP, read: “Long Live
the Great, Glorious and Just Revolutionary Struggle for National
Liberation of the Oppressed Peoples of the Colonies,”26 using the
triumphalist language that was a hallmark of the movement.
Although several hundred young people were involved on the
appointed days, the various demonstrations against the colonial wars
faced great difficulty in “getting started” or doing so with any density.27
This helps explain the explosion of a particular form of street protest,
namely “flash demonstrations” (manifs-relâmpago), the first of which
took place on 3 April 1973. According to Luta Popular, “several hundred
young people” ran through a busy area of Lisbon, “waving red flags and
placards with revolutionary slogans, throwing stones at the banks,
distributing leaflets to passers-by” and shouting out slogans, such as “the
People’s War on the Colonial War!” At the same time, similar slogans
were being painted on walls and the outsides of trams, buses, and coaches,
so that, in the words of the movement itself, they would be traveling “at
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rush hour, through the central and peripheral zones of Lisbon bearing the
bright red slogans of the revolutionary proletariat!”28 The introduction of
this new form of political intervention was designed to avoid attacks by
the police, who found it more difficult to intersect small, mobile groups,
and resulted in a form of rebellion that had a greater impact and
imprinted a new form of protest on the geography of the city.
An aggressive activism that was less concerned with conspiratorial caution
therefore became another characteristic of the MRPP. This new style of
confrontation with the authorities included organizing flash demonstrations,
distributing pamphlets in broad daylight, and throwing stones at banking
institutions. Arming themselves with iron bars to face the police or the
aggression of the PIDE/DGS agents during demonstrations was a further
illustration of the confrontational attitude of the groups. Another common
practice—which also served to test the revolutionary spirit of new recruits—
involved daubing large slogans in various locations in the city of Lisbon and
gradually in other places in the country. The praise lavished on political
courage, leading to actions that did not always observe the customary
conspiratorial caution, helps to explain the number of militants who were
imprisoned and subjected to torture—amounting to 30 in three years,
some more than once.29
The image of the MRPP that has been preserved in the public memory
highlights aspects of its political intervention that emerged or developed
later, during the Carnation Revolution of 1974 –75. In the first place, there
are the huge and excellent-quality murals they produced, usually featuring
the people parading in working clothes in specific poses. With its frenetic,
sectarian style, this feature gave rise to the expression Meninos Rabinos
que Pintam Paredes (“naughty boys who write on walls”) as a pejorative
description of the group.30 Second, in the context of the imprisonment of
432 militants in May 1975, a kind of cult emerged around the party leader,
Arnaldo Matos, also a prisoner. From this time onward, he would be
known by the MRPP as the “Great Leader and Educator of the Working
Class,” and poems and murals appeared representing him in this role.
These two aspects, as well as an attitude of permanent hostility toward the
PCP, shaped the prevailing image of the MRPP, downplaying the dimension
and nature of the activism carried out by the group in the period before 25
April 1974. With the demise of the Estado Novo, the group made a decisive
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contribution toward establishing a new focus on opposition to the war,
which until the mid-1960s had been blocked by the “delayed” nature of
Portuguese anticolonialism.31 This helps to explain the politicization of
the Portuguese youth, within a context in which the regime was showing
signs of intending to continue the war it had been waging for 13 years, and
also created the specific characteristics of the political radicalism that
emerged in the 1960s and 1970s.
The “Long Sixties,” “International Maoism,” and Anticolonialism
The place of the Maoist phenomenon in the so-called “long sixties” is one
of the aspects evoked in studies of this period, even though the
interpretations are sometimes tinged with caricatures and clichés.32 In
Western countries, specifically those within Europe, French Maoism
gained unprecedented visibility,33 partly explained by the May 1968
uprising and political radicalism in the country and the involvement or
support of leading intellectuals in Maoist or proto-Maoist movements.
Conversely, the phenomenon has received less attention in other Western
countries, where— given the amount of support it attracted, the
originality of its forms of organization, and the political practices and
discourses it expressed—it also achieved some political relevance.34
Moreover, active involvement in organizations that subscribed to this
ideology is often understood as a youthful phase preceding later
accommodation within the political, economic, or intellectual elites. The
imagined model for this trajectory is that of the former militant who is
nowadays either a media figure or works for the government or the
business sector, and this is very evident in Portugal, given the endless
attention paid to the brief histories of the youthful political affiliations of
a handful of leading public figures.35
In addition, many observations on the Western Maoism of the period
characterize it as the mere sectarian recycling of a Marxism-Leninism that
essentially sought to mechanically transplant the Chinese model to other
places. George Katsiaficas, in one of the first studies on the “global
sixties,” describes Maoism as exterior to the essential dynamics of the age.
Katsiaficas believes that these years were influenced by a vague Marcusian
“Eros effect” that created a clear dividing line between the “old left” and
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its “coercion methods” and the “new left” that sought to “win people’s
hearts and minds through persuasion.” According to this scheme, the
Maoists were part of a “new old left,” characterized by the influence of
events such as the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which had “little to do
with the essential character of the movement.”36 André Glucksmann—a
former Gauche Prolétarienne militant and later a key figure in
antitotalitarian Atlanticism— considers that ideology produces peculiar
forms of “intellectual suicide.”37 In turning this into a kind of eccentricity,
these interpretations make it difficult to understand the phenomenon in
the light of what it represented in Western countries: a product of sixties
radicalism assuming different contours according to the different national
contexts in which it was molded.
In a different way, in “Periodizing the Sixties,” an essay first published
in 1984, Fredric Jameson refers to Maoism as the ideology that best
translated the radical Weltanschauung, to the extent that it led to a
“displacement” of the dichotomies through which communism had
traditionally interpreted political antagonism: the opposite of “bourgeois”
was no longer “proletarian” but “revolutionary.”38 In the Maoist camp,
party membership or class background tended to be downplayed, while
moral considerations concerning the refusal of privileges of any kind,
identification with the ideal of proletarian life, and engagement with the
fight against all forms of oppression increasingly became the criteria for
political judgment.
Among these issues, the colonial question became particularly
significant in some parts of the globe. The so-called “Third World” served
at the time as an umbrella term under which a very different number of
experiences and processes could be grouped,39 which, when combined,
allowed for a radical critique of the existing situation and the
simultaneous elaboration of radical alternatives.40 Thus, the struggles for
independence and recognition set in motion in the “Third World”
enabled connections to be made between transnational space—in which
figures such as Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Ho-Chi-Minh, and Mao
Tse-tung (as well as Amílcar Cabral, Malcolm X, and Frantz Fanon)
circulated—and what Christopher Leigh Connery called the “new politics
of temporality.”41 This was evident in aspects like the critique of labor and
its rhythms, the emphasis on flows of revolutionary energy that could
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unleash the stages of development identified by classical Marxism (ofwhich the Guevarist foco theory of guerrilla warfare and the China of the“Great Leap Forward” and the “Cultural Revolution” are the mostsignificant examples), and the identification of new historical subjects.
Shaping the Repertoire of Protest
Particularly in Western democracies, this process intersected with theemergence of a new language of protest defined by a celebration ofambiguity and rejection of the “discipline of politics” traditionallyconstructed around notions like organization, hierarchy, and leadership.42
These traits were present in what A. Belden Fields terms “anti-hierarchicalMaoism,” which was particularly evident in France, inspired by issuessuch as the nature and different strands of oppression and the search formore fluid forms of organization.43 However, they were less evident in theMaoism that developed in Portuguese territory, which may be explainedby a series of factors. First, the “semi-peripheral” nature of Portuguesesociety44— distant both from the core developed countries and theperipheral countries—made it difficult for a postmaterialist discourse tobe substantially absorbed in the same way that resounded with a certainsector of philo-libertarian European and North American youth.Interestingly, the weak urban development in the country—although thiswas changing at the time, with the exodus of the rural population dueboth to emigration and migration to the cities, and the consequent fall inemployment and primary sector GDP45— did not lead to any substantialattempts to establish Maoism in rural areas, nor to any emphasis on theemancipatory power of the peasantry.46 This can be explained by the factthat Maoism in Portugal was essentially a young urban phenomenon—although it had some impact on intellectuals and the fringes of theworking-class movement—which took the student world as its favoredarena for intervention and recruitment. Second, correlating with this, theextent of the wide-ranging conservative Catholic morality also helps toexplain the almost total lack of organized attitudes associated with“antidisciplinary” radicalism, which, for example, fueled the FrenchMaoism linked with the Gauche Prolétarienne.47
Third, it is important to stress the role played by censorship andrepression in restricting the type of protest that was possible, which forced
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political activities into a clandestine or semilegal existence, even
interiorizing risk as a permanent feature of militant life. In fact, “punitive
violence”—the complex of laws, courts, prisons, and police designed to
monitor and punish dissidence— constituted a kind of second security
ring that was activated whenever self-restraint in terms of obedience and
order failed.48 In effect, as previously stressed, the expectations and effects
of repression not only served as a constraint but were also a factor that
shaped the identity of the opposition organizations in the final years of the
dictatorship, above all those that had a strong student membership.49
Although state authoritarianism constrained political activity, ultimately
it also endowed it with a “romantic” dimension, in which risk and
courage would emerge as the elements that shaped the experience of
militancy.
Finally, the role that fighting the dictatorship and, later, the colonial
war played in shaping political opposition should be stressed. The
authoritarianism of the Estado Novo and the physical and psychological
risk that the armed conflict in Africa introduced into the lives of each
young person and, by extension, their circle of family and friends,
significantly overdetermined the repertoire of protest. These were the
strands that would structure Portuguese left-wing radicalism in the first
half of the 1970s, relegating other political and cultural forms of combat to
secondary concerns.
Conclusions
Anchored in the radicalized youth sectors, Maoism incorporated a
recognition of events, figures, and proposals that rejected the postwar
geopolitical supremacies and advocated the need for profound and
revolutionary political change. As one of the components of the far left
that found international expression during the “long sixties,” the way in
which it materialized locally was, however, sensitive to the social
formations, political contexts, and concrete challenges presented in each
national context.
In Portugal, Maoism therefore acquired certain characteristics of its
own, resulting from the specific circumstances of the country at the time,
including that it was governed by a dictatorship that, against the tide of
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history, was engaged in a war in Africa to preserve its empire. Among the
Maoist groups that emerged in the country, the MRPP was the most
visibly active in Lisbon and its surroundings: it advocated an aggressive
style of political intervention very much based on triumphalism and
militant courage that converged with certain conservative positions
regarding behavior, through which it sought to emphasize an imagined
“proletarian morality.” However, the central aspect that shaped its
intervention was clearly the fight against the colonial war, which helped to
define a new model for opposing the Portuguese Estado Novo
dictatorship, thus territorializing an ideology expressed in various
different ways throughout the world during the 1960s and 1970s.
NOTES
The author wishes to thank Rui Bebiano, Bruno Sena Martins, and the anonymous
reviewers for their comments on an earlier version of this text. This work was supported by
the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology under Grants SFRH/BD/22796/
2005 and IF/00757/2013/CP1164/CT0004.
1. Fernando Rosas and Pedro Aires Oliveira, A Transição Falhada: O Marcelismo e o Fim
do Estado Novo (Lisbon: Editorial Notícias, 2004). For a concrete example of this, see
Norman McQueen and Pedro Aires Oliveira, “‘Grocer Meets Butcher’: Marcello
Caetano’s London Visit of 1973 and the Last Days of Portugal’s Estado Novo,” Cold War
History 10, no. 1 (2009): 29 –50. On the “International Dimensions of Portuguese Late
Colonialism and Decolonization,” see the special issue with this title of Portuguese
Studies 29, no. 2 (2013), edited by Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo and António Costa Pinto.
2. John P. Cann, Counterinsurgency in Africa: The Portuguese Way of War, 1961–1974
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997), 106.
3. Victor Pereira, “Les réseaux de l’émigration clandestine portugaise vers la France entre
1957 et 1974,” Journal of Modern European History 12, no. 1 (2014): 108.
4. This construct owes a great deal to the adoption of Lusotropicalism, a theory developed
by the Brazilian Gilberto Freyre that was well received in Portugal, replacing, in the
1950s, the more obviously racist theories used to justify the legitimacy of the
“Portuguese Colonial Empire.” Citing the innate capacity of the Portuguese for
miscegenation and cultural interpenetration, Lusotropicalism was adopted by the elites
within the regime but also featured widely in mass culture in the final years of the
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dictatorship. At the same time, the theory was deployed to resist international demands
that the country should introduce decolonialization. On Lusotropicalism, see Marcos
Cardão and Cláudia Castelo, Gilberto Freyre. Novas leituras do outro lado do Atlântico
(São Paulo: Edusp, 2015).
5. On the political role of these images, see Afonso Ramos, “Angola 1961, o horror das
imagens,” in O Império da Visão: Fotografia no Contexto Colonial português (1860 –1960),